Member of Knesset Amit HaLevi (Likud), a member of both the Knesset Central Elections Committee and the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, issued an urgent appeal to Shabak director David Zini.
In his appeal, the lawmaker requested a significant increase in monitoring and prevention efforts against attempts by foreign actors to interfere in the State of Israel’s upcoming national elections.
According to HaLevi, the current security environment has heightened the risk of outside elements to deepen social polarization and undermine Israel’s internal stability.
“The election system is a democratic vulnerability that serves as a strategic target for hostile states,” HaLevi wrote.
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of unprecedentedly blatant interference, with enormous budgets from foreign governments being invested in activities that undermine the state under the guise of humanitarian organizations.”
HaLevi further urged Zini to utilize advanced tools to identify and thwart digital influence operations, including bots, and requested that funding channels presented as social projects and support for civil society activities be closely monitored to ensure that they aren’t actually directed toward political agendas.
“It is our duty to ensure that election results reflect solely the will of Israel’s citizens – the true sovereign in the state,” HaLevi’s letter concluded.
“We will not allow any foreign actor to determine who leads the State of Israel.”
The lawmaker’s appeal came just days after the release of a United States House Judiciary Committee memo, The Biden-Harris Administration’s Funding of Anti-Netanyahu Non-Governmental Organizations, Part II, detailing how former US President Joe Biden’s administration misused taxpayer funds through the State Department, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other federal agencies to directly and indirectly finance the 2023 judicial reform protests aimed at bringing down Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition.
The fact that HaLevi is raising the issue at this time demonstrates that he understands the problem to go far beyond the Biden team’s active involvement in providing material support for the anti-government protests.
Anyone who’s been paying attention to Washington’s history of interference in Israeli politics would quickly see Biden’s behavior as simply part of a pattern that includes George H.W. Bush’s 1992 efforts to remove Prime Minister Yitzḥak Shamir (Likud) from office, Bill Clinton’s 1999 effort to oust Netanyahu, and Barack Obama’s failed 2015 attempt to do the same.
There’s also evidence that the political instability that brought down Netanyahu’s coalition in 2019, and subsequently led the country to four consecutive election cycles in two years, was the work of Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) on behalf of President Donald Trump.
The fact that HaLevi is already taking steps to defend Israel from foreign interference in the upcoming elections indicates that he anticipates the possibility that Trump could try to influence the vote in such a way that would result in a new coalition more compliant to American demands.
